During his short career as a clerk in a law office, Henri Matisse secretly took painting classes, eventually devoting himself to the pursuit of art full-time. He went to study in Paris, first at the Académie Julian and then at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he trained in the traditional academic style of his teachers Adolphe-William Bouguereau and Gustave Moreau. Under the influence of painters such as the Impressionists and Cézanne, as well as the light-filled landscapes of the French Riviera, Matisse forsook these conservative roots and developed a new style based on flat shapes of vivid color. In 1905, he exhibited work at the Salon d'Automne in Paris as the leader of the Fauves (French for "wild beasts"). This was an avant-garde movement that reduced painting to a bright palette, simple forms, and exuberant brushwork in order to communicate the fundamental elements of reality and sensation.

Matisse painted "The Young Sailor" in 1906, at the height of his involvement with the Fauves. The sitter of this picture is an eighteen-year-old fisherman, Germain Augustin Barthélémy Montargès, from the small Mediterranean village of Collioure, near the Spanish border. Against the flat, bright pink background, Germain wears typical fisherman's garb: a navy blue cap, a pullover over a white undershirt and blue-and-pink striped jersey, baggy green pants, green-and-white checked socks, and sturdy, laced-up shoes with rubber soles. His broad face is flat and mask-like, and the contours of his rounded limbs are crisp and defined, creating a sharp contrast to the loose brushstrokes that constitute them. Germain's rather theatrical looks and the work's bold palette, in which the figure's green and blue outfit is set against the pink, candy-colored ground, combine to make this painting one of Matisse's most decorative portraits in the Fauve manner.

Signatures, Inscriptions, and Markings

Inscription: Signed and dated (lower left): Henri-Matisse /1906

Provenance

the artist (1906–13; sold on October 9, 1913 to Bernheim-Jeune); [Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, 1913–22; stock no. 20027]; [Leopold Zborowski, Paris, 1922]; [J. B. Neumann, New York]; Hans Seligman-Schürch, Berlin and Basel (1923–52; sold on February 4, 1952, for $25,000, to Matisse); [Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1952; stock no. SP3, sold on March 22, 1952, partly by exchange, for $35,000, to Block]; Mr. and Mrs. Leigh B. Block, Chicago (1952–69); [Marlborough Gallery, New York, 1969; sold in 1969 to Gelman]; Jacques and Natasha Gelman, Mexico City and New York (1969–his d. 1986); Natasha Gelman, Mexico City and New York (1986–d. 1998; her bequest to MMA)

Museum of Modern Art, New York. "The 'Wild Beasts': Fauvism and Its Affinities," March 26–June 1, 1976, unnumbered cat. (p. 96; as "The Young Sailor II," lent by Mr. and Mrs. Jacques Gelman, Mexico City).

San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. "The 'Wild Beasts': Fauvism and Its Affinities," June 29–August 15, 1976, unnumbered cat.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "Painters in Paris: 1895–1950," March 8–December 31, 2000, extended to January 14, 2001, unnumbered cat. (p. 64; as "The Young Sailor II").

Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art. "Picasso and the School of Paris: Paintings from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York," September 14–November 24, 2002, no. 9 (as "The Young Sailor").

Tokyo. Bunkamura Museum of Art. "Picasso and the School of Paris: Paintings from The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York," December 7, 2002–March 9, 2003, no. 9.

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions," October 24, 2008–February 1, 2009, online catalogue (as "The Young Sailor").

Henri Matisse. Letter to Walter Pach. December 6, 1912 [reproduced and published in English transl. in Ref. Cauman 1991, pp. 3, 5], calls this picture "Jeune marin" and lists this picture among those that he will lend to the Armory Show; notes that it is for sale.

Leo Stein. Appreciation: Painting, Poetry, and Prose. New York, 1947, p. 192, refers to this picture as a "free copy of ['Young Sailor I'] with extreme deformations"; recalls that Matisse pretended it was painted by the Collioure postman; notes that it was the artist's first experimentation with "forced deformations".

Alfred H. Barr, Jr. Matisse: His Art and His Public. New York, 1951, pp. 82, 93–94, 97, 128–29, 149–50, 157, 163, 179, 194, 246, ill. p. 335, states that both versions of "Young Sailor" were painted during the same month in 1906, at Collioure; notes that Walter Pach suggested omitting this picture from the Montross Gallery exhibition [Exh. New York 1915] since it was poorly received in the Armory Show, but that Matisse "insisted, arguing that the public should see the strongest pictures even though it was offended by them at first".

Bernard Myers. "Matisse and the Fauves." American Artist 15 (December 1951), pp. 71, 86, ill., calls it "The Young Sailor".

Jack Flam in"Primitivism" in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. Ed. William Rubin. Exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art. New York, 1984, vol. 1, pp. 221, 223, 238 n. 79, ill., calls it "The Young Sailor II"; comments that this picture was not painted directly from the model, but from the first version; observes that it is a "meditation on that [first] encounter and a rendering of it in conceptual terms," adding that Matisse only dated this second version "as if to imply that this is where he stood [artistically] in 1906".

Milton W. Brown. The Story of the Armory Show. 2nd ed. [1st ed., 1963]. New York, 1988, pp. 127, 292, calls it "Jeune Marin"; notes that this work was lent by the artist to the 1913 Armory Show, where it was for sale for $1,350.

John Klein. Matisse Portraits. New Haven, 2001, pp. 13, 256 n. 28, comments that the two "paintings of the young sailor are no more portraits than the quasi-ethnographic generalizations Matisse made in his later depictions of Moroccans or Eskimos".

Alastair Wright. Matisse and the Subject of Modernism. Princeton, 2004, pp. 150–52, 256 n. 80, calls it "Young Sailor (II)"; considers the "insistent visibility of the colored outlines" in this picture to be analogous to the mechanical "reproductive technology of the woodcut".

Joséphine Matamoros inMatisse-Derain: Collioure 1905, un été fauve. Exh. cat., Musée départemental d'Art moderne, Céret. [Paris], 2005, pp. 22–23, 289 n. 68, identifies the sitter as Camille Calmon, who was sixteen years old at the time of this painting, based on information provided by Mme Matisse in the Archives Matisse.